problems shutdown stopping processes from cron

Hi,

I have a Linux PC at home which runs boinc citizen science projects. Its running a version of Peppermint, which is based on Debian 6.1.94-1

I want to run the computer only when I have cheap rate electricity at night (00:00 - 05:00)

So I have the bios configured to boot at 00:00 and crontab to shutdown at 05:00.
I do exactly this on a second PC running a different version of debian and it works perfectly.

The problem on my peppermint computer is it doesnt shutdown from crontab

I'm editing crontab using sudo crontab -e, and if I locate the crontab file I see its the root one

My crontab has this :

Code:0 5 * * * /usr/sbin/shutdown -h now >> /var/log/shutdown.log 2>&1
50 4 * * * /etc/init.d/boinc-client stop >>/var/log/boinc-client.log 2>&1Initially I had just the first line, but noticed the machine did not shutdown
I wondered if the boinc client was hogging the cpu and somehow delaying the shutdown and causing it to timeout, so I added the second line

I later added the redirections and I get nothing in the shutdown.log file.

The boinc-client.log has the standard output from systemctl:

Code:Stopping boinc-client (via systemctl): boinc-client.service.However when I look the next day neither action has been carried out and the boinc-client is still running and the server is not shutdown

I can carry out both the boinc-client stop and shutdown from the shell via sudo correctly ?

cron is running in the background.

I'm puzzled as to why I don't appear to be able to action tasks sucessfully from it